In the Guardian, Jules Boykoff takes stock of the seriousness with which national security experts inside and outside the U.S. military view climate change, a subject I’ve often take up here and elsewhere. As Boykoff drily notes: This isn’t a tree-hugging festival. It’s the US military and its partners making clear-eyed calculations based on the best…Continue Reading…
Well, that was interesting. Here are some nuggets from the discussion. On the inconsistent standards of climate skeptics: The symmetry of this issue is intriguing to me. With regard to Mann we’re told all that matters is that there’s a flaw. It doesn’t matter whether correcting it changes the conclusion, it doesn’t matter whether the same conclusion was reached by…Continue Reading…
This is the opening to a terrific story by Rex Dalton in Miller-McCune: It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing…Continue Reading…
Some regular readers might be surprised to learn that I think this latest National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, called “America’s Climate Choices,” should inspire more than a collective yawn from the media. But as Charlie Petit explains, there are institutional reasons for this: The news business is about what’s new. If a prestigious body…Continue Reading…
The response by some climate scientists and climate bloggers to a nuanced perspective on the tornado/climate change issue reveals just how zero sum the climate debate remains in some corners. In a follow-up to this superb post, Andy Revkin draws attention to a missing component in recent tornado-related commentary from some prominent voices in the…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: I just noticed this talk is a year old. Still, it’s pretty fascinating. Anyone interested in how the journalistic sausage gets made in the UK, about the cozy relationship between British reporters and politicians, about how climate change gets covered in the media, should watch this revealing talk by Sarah Mukherjee, who until recently was…Continue Reading…
Can we all agree on this statement from Penn State geologist Richard Alley? I think it’s important to say that the interaction between radiation and gases in the air is not red or blue. It’s not Republican or Democrat, or libertarian or anything else. It’s physics. That’s from an interview that Alley does with the…Continue Reading…
An editorial in Nature says that Matthew Nisbet’s Climate shift report “dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases.” I guess they didn’t get the memo from the climate capo or the reprint over at the watchdog site. The Nature…Continue Reading…
As reported last month in Nature, Scientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity’s influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution, but thousands of years ago. Now, in a guest post at Real Climate, William Ruddiman summarizes the new evidence that will appear in an upcoming…Continue Reading…
I never got around to writing about this recent essay from recovering scientist-turned filmmaker Randy Olson, so I’m glad that Andy Revkin has taken it up at Dot Earth. Do watch the 10-minute Skype video interview that Revkin also posts, where Olson says: The problem in the environmental and science worlds as far as I can…Continue Reading…